Revising your writing

My mom and dad in Hawaii

Revision is a necessary evil.

Writing is not something you sit down and do correctly in one sitting.  Oh, you might be able to cobble together an essay the night before it's due and even, if you're gifted with words, write something that is reasonably good.  But reasonably good should never be settled for.  We don't settle for reasonably good in most areas of our life if we can avoid it.

Students in college are lucky in that most teachers are overworked and underpaid, and they don't have the time to spend a great deal of time on any one essay that they grade.  I spend, on average, ten minutes per essay if I am really taking my time and working hard at it, this despite the fact that I can usually read one paragraph and tell whether I have an A,B,C,D, or F paper in my hand.  Last semester -- this semester is easier thankfully -- I had 65 composition students in my day class and an additional 35 in my night classes.  Multiply 100 by 10 and you get 1,000 minutes or over 16 hours of time spent on a cursory grading session.  I work Monday through Friday, leaving the house at about 6:15 a.m. in the morning and arrive back home at around 4 p.m. most days, except for Thursday.  I teach a night class from 4 to 7 p.m.  and usually don't get home until about 7:30.  On Wednesday, I come home for an hour and a half or so and then teach another night class from 6:30 to 9 p.m.  That leaves five days -- over three hours a night grading when I have a set of papers come in.

I've strayed from the subject slightly, but my point is that I can't spend the time I should to grade papers.  If I did, I doubt very seriously if 10 percent of my papers would receive A's.  People think that they are finished when they have written a decent first draft, but far from it.

In the revision process, you should basically rewrite everything, checking content, wording, sentence structure --everything.  Many students think running grammar and spell check is the same thing as revising.  Again, far from it.

A grammar check won't tell you, for instance, that the word stagger gives a much more vivid image than does the word walk.  I always do a short assignment to get my students to see how the connotations of words that are considered synonyms can be so vastly different.  Take walk.  Here are some synonyms.
stagger, strut, glide, meander, tiptoe, stomp, shuffle, stride, glomp, swagger,  all have very different images associated with them.  Be precise in your writing.  There are a lot of good writers out there, but you want to be the best.

Try it for yourself.  Write as many synonyms as you can for the verb look.  You should be able to get ten to fifteen easily.

My daughter's coming home tomorrow.  It's only for one day, a night, and part of another day, but I so look forward to seeing her.  I miss her dreadfully when she is not here.

My family members have been experiencing some very strange things.  All of them seem to be messages from meemaw.  My sister said that her grandson put a blanket my mom made for him in this baby seat thing -- I forgot what she called it -- for his baby sister (my niece is pregnant) and despite not having had batteries for four years, it suddenly played Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

It's so comforting.